Poison, Tourism, and Still Unanswered Questions in SE Asia

Last month, I wrote a post about the mysterious deaths of two young Canadian sisters on vacation in Thailand this summer. I was troubled by the ever-changing explanation of Thai authorities, including what seemed to me to be a preposterous proposal that the women were killed by mosquito repellent mixed into a beach cocktail.

My point was mostly that DEET, the main ingredient in mosquito repellent, isn’t very poisonous.

Since I wrote that column, the authorities have changed their minds twice about this. Last week, as reported by both Thai and Canadian media, they retracted the DEET claim. Then, this Friday, they suddenly reinstated it. Meanwhile, no one has offered a good explanation for how these two young women, Audrey and Noemi Belanger, were killed by drinking cocktails that harmed no one else on the beach.

As I wrote in a second post, “Poisoning the (Female) Tourist in Asia”, neither have authorities offered up any clear explanation of what appears to be a whole series of female tourist deaths – many linked to symptoms of poison – in both Thailand and Vietnam during the past several years.

And as I said Saturday, during an interview on the Weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, there’s a troubling pattern here. There’s official stone-walling despite evidence of toxic exposure found by both Asian and independent laboratories. This suggests a cover up. And there’s a trail of dead women, which suggests that one possibility being covered up is murder, even possibly serial murder. You can listen to me discuss this with Guy Adams during the interview here.

I’ve received numerous e-mails and comments following both the blog posts and the NPR interview, some from people reminding me of other poisonings in Asia, such as a mass poisoning in Bali in 2009, due to the sale of a home-brew palm wine that contained lethal levels of methanol. Some have written to detail the own illnesses while traveling in the region.

People have also written to point that DEET is heavily used and widely available in tropical locations. So that perhaps a tourist could accidentally overdose herself (Although, again, toxicology data suggests that even a super-spray of repellent at best is most likely to trigger low-level dizziness and nausea, perhaps some skin irritation, but not a drop-dead situation). Others have written to point out that DEET could interact with other compounds in a cocktail, that there might be a kind of synergistic toxicity.

Maybe. But still my problem with the police theory is that 1) people living in Thailand wrote to say they’d never heard of such a cocktail mixture 2) my own research didn’t find that recipe either 3) again, if beach cocktails were being mixed up with insecticide how come no one else got sick? and 4) none of this explains the range of other poison-related deaths in both Thailand and Vietnam that have occurred.

I also heard from a friend of Kari Bowerman, the Wisconsin-native who died in Vietnam this summer, who has started a Facebook page, Protected Travels, which both provides background on the deaths in question and offers advice on self-protected journeys. He wrote: “I’ve been following your blog posts and just finished reading your interview with NPR. Thanks for helping raise awareness of all the international tourists who have lost their lives mysteriously in Southeast Asia.”

And, yes, that’s part of my goal here – to raise awareness. But also to put a little pressure – as much pressure as someone with a poison-focused blog can manage to create – on the authorities in South Asia to provide these families with better answers. And by better, I don’t mean “happy talk” answers or hand-holding answers. I mean clear and consistent answers. Honest would be good too.

To repeat myself just once more, this response is not owed to me. But it is owed to the parents and partners, families and friends of these lost women. They deserve better.